Selling US shares on ETrade and money back to Australia

[gatzso]

Hi

Apologies for the long description.

I'm looking to sell my company shares (awarded as yearly bonus). The company is US based hence the shares are on Etrade.com.
Whats the best way to sell these shares and transfer the proceeds back to Australia? (So that i can have this more readily available to contribute towards mortgage deposit.. which will be sometime early next year). But I'm looking to sell this asap, as the stock prices are good.

Options Ive explored sofar:
1. Sell & wire transfer from Etrade directly into my everyday AUD account. Which seems least cost effective considering Etrade would charge something like $27 + 300 basic points (3%) of transacted amount. And their exchange rate is not the best.
2. Create a foreign currency USD account in Australia and transfer from Etrade to that account. And then exchange USD to AUD when the conversion is good. EDIT: Etrade advised that they'd only charge the Wire transfer charge of about $27.
Now, I bank with ANZ who apparently dont provide USD accounts for individuals. anyone recommend a bank/account?
3. Sell the shares and Wire the proceeds to OFX's account and then transfer to my local AUD account. (no fees from OFX seems too good to be true). But OFX want a "Sale of Shares document" which Etrade customer support claim has no clue of.

I'm sure there's someone out there has done this before with less pain. Option 2 seems promising & simple.Should I be concerned of any hidden costs associated with Option 2?
Is there another option I haven't considered?

 

[minwa]

Option 2 I believe only HSBC and Citi offer personal foreign currency accounts. You still get ~1-3% haircut on exchanging back to AUD when you eventually convert. You are not really saving anything over option 1, the exchange rate is from the banks side, not ETrade, which you have still have to suffer when you eventually convert. Only upside (which could backfire depending on your AUDUSD picking skills/luck) of this option over 1 is you can choose when to convert back to AUD.

The best way I know of is option 2 with an added step of opening an IB account. Etrade withdraw USD to foreign currency account, then send it to IB brokerage, convert USD to AUD in IB then withdraw to local bank account. This avoids the currency haircut.

OFX seems to lower the haircut to 100 points. Pretty sure the no fees is correct, they make their margin on the haircut. This could be less hassle than using IB except you still get exchange loss.

You have to decide how much are you actually converting and is it really worth opening a new bank account and possibly new brokerage just to save on the conversion ? Personally if the savings go into 4 figures then I would definitely do it.

 

[nganga]

CBA offers personal Foreign Currency account. Just google foreign currency account commbank. Seeing that you don't bank with CBA, I'd recommend you pass by a branch and ask about opening one. You can easily manage the account on their internet banking platform, Netbank.